We were approached by Sky TV to try their new AdSmart system to reach a specific target audience for our fostering campaign. In January this year we ran the campaign for 30 days and you can read more here.

So how did we get on? Well we had the highest number of fostering enquiries we have ever had in one month – we received 65 enquiries! Prior to this, we were receiving on average 26 enquiries a month.

So can this all be attributed to Sky? Since we were running other marketing at the same time, it’s difficult to be too precise. However, what we can say for certain is in January we received 3 direct enquiries from Sky, we had 16 enquiries directly from our website (which viewers were being directed to at the end of the advert) and 22 through Google (if people had searched for fostering online).

Sky also sent a questionnaire to a sample group of households. Although the response rate for this was low (130 responses), there was 22% recall of the advert being seen and 33% of those that had seen the advert recalled seeing some Buckinghamshire County Council advertising on fostering.

So is Sky advertising worth doing? Well, I certainly want to try it again. I think Sky’s AdSmart system has provided us with an opportunity to target our messages to specific audiences and through the medium of television, which was never really possible for us before. The costs aren’t astronomical and now we have the advert we are able to use it as and when we need at no extra cost.

If you are thinking about using AdSmart my advice would be, use the Experian data provided by Sky to target the right audience, get your messages right, give yourself plenty of time…this isn’t something you want to rush into and most of all, set up some sort of evaluation mechanism – so that you can gauge how successful this will be. Oh and also use the advert as widely as possible to get real value for money. We promoted our advert on social media using a platform called Thunderclap. This cost us nothing and had a social reach of over 52,000.

We are also using it at our fostering information sessions, when giving presentations on fostering and it’s on our website. So best of luck if you do use it and please do share the results.

Anushka Desai is senior customer and communications officer at Buckinghamshire County Council.

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